We have all heard the claim that the potential of the World Wide Web is more than in electronic brochures or books or clickable commercials. What does that mean?

THE AUDIENCE CAN MESS WITH IT
The web is more dependant upon the response of its users than any medium in the history of published communication. The reader, or visitor, or user, etc., has more control than ever over how the communication will be experienced.

And what is the nature of the communication? Not in its creator's eyes, but its reader's? Depending on the reader's experience of it, it can be the most utilitarian of documents, as if it were photo-copied and stapled together. Or it can be a place, in flux, and crowded with the presence of other visitors. It can be a brochure or commercial, slick and polished, suggesting a sense of confidence and enthusiasm (or mistrust!). It can be a no-nonsense library, a rich archive; an ongoing, shared experiment. It can be a refuge. It can be a call to arms. It can be an examination of itself. It can be cacophony, either exhilirating or confusing.

There is no right or wrong. There is only the necessity, as in all communication arts, to make the communication itself the focus, and to find the approach that best serves the focus.

IT'S ALIVE
Very important: a website is never "done" -- it is "set in motion". This concept alone completely transforms the nature of published communications. First, few websites can get away with maintaining a static presence (ahem). Even in in the medium of print, many companies are designing much more modular, easily updatable sales materials, such as folders and binders.

Ultimately, it is a medium that continues to be in a constant state of reinventing itself. The development of the WWW is determining the future of world trade and communication just as its future is being determined by those same influences.

NO MEANING WITHOUT PLACE; NO PLACE WITHOUT MEANING
When a company or an individual chooses to establish a web presence, they are, to a greater degree than ever before, giving the public a way to come and "see" them. For this reason, it is important to make sure and provide the experience of a meaningful and enjoyable "location". In addition, the opportunity exists to say everything one has ever wanted to say to the world, which makes it especially important to organize information clearly and flexibly. And going online means joining the internet community -- preferably as a cooperative, gracious, and active member, which leads to cross-links and other mutually-beneficial concepts.

IT'S ALWAYS MORE THAN YOU THINK IT IS
Consider the website spacially, and perhaps even more abstractly: Although it essentially exists in two dimensions, take into account the capacity of place and community it fulfills, and it really functions in more than three.

You may get only pictures and sound, but here at the first Big Bang of a revolutionary medium, you also get a choice: Will you choose to exercise your freedom and your imagination, filling in the other senses yourself; responding, interacting, and discerning? or will you settle for internet TV -- something that will once again feel and think for you so you don't have to? Thus, at least at this point in time, the World Wide Web is also an opportunity to redefine and reclaim individual self-determination, and individual power. If you have spent some time exploring the web, you have seen the turbulence and flow of this choice being made.

This is not an issue to be set to the side while we sell product and pay the mortgage. It is becoming more and more obvious that you can sell product and pay the mortgage and engage your ethics. Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Chairman, Tachi Kiuchi, addressed this eloquently in a speech to the World Future Society on July 19, 1997. You can read the entire transcript of his speech at the Sustainable Business Network website. The message can be summed up in his closing comment, "The mission of business -- the mission of civilization -- is to develop the human ecosystem, sustainably".



Finally, each website, or area of a website, can fulfill such widely different functions -- it can be so many different things -- that it demands tremendous amounts of imagination (alternately bridled and unbridled!), as well as cooperation: the best websites are team-built, a meeting of many talents and skills, the whole being far greater than the sum of the parts.

How does one design and develop a website that maximizes the potential of the World Wide Web? We'll be looking at this question in great detail, so stay tuned. And if you have questions, ideas, suggestions for this topic, please drop me a line!